Windows: A Book About Stained & Painted Glass

What are the characteristics of the various styles in glass? How does one tell the period of a window? These are not questions that can be fully answered in the short space of a...

The course of glass design was picture-ward. Picture design, however, did not stand still, and hence arises some confusion in the use of the word "pictorial." It is time to try...

Having followed the course of technique thus far, it may be as well to survey the situation and see where we now stand. Suppose an artist altogether without experience in glass...

The subdivision of art into periods is in reality the veriest makeshift. To be on quite safe ground we should have, as a matter of fact, to reduce our periods to not more than h...

The art of the glass painter was at first only the art of the glazier. To say that may seem like self-contradiction. But it is not so. On the contrary, it is almost literally th...

The customary line between Gothic and Renaissance glass is drawn at about A.D. 1530. That is to say, that there are to be found examples, presumably of that date, which are stil...

According as we contemplate glass painting from the earlier or the later standpoint, from the point of view of glass or of painting, we are sure to prefer one period to the othe...

If old windows have suffered at the hands of time, they have also gained, apart from sentiment, a tone and quality which the glass had not when it was new.

The magnificent windows of Van Orley at S. Gudule, Brussels, mark in a sense the summit of design, as well as of painting, in stained glass. But it is design of a kind not stric...

In the thirteenth century the practice of the earlier glaziers stiffened into something like a tradition, and design took almost inevitably the form of (1) the Medallion window,...

The course of the glass hunter seems never yet to have been clearly mapped out for him. Nor can he depend upon those who pretend to direct his steps. The enthusiastic descriptio...

In the course of the preceding chapters the reader has been rather unceremoniously carried from country to country, in a way which may have seemed to him erratic. But there was...

Glass in tracery lights and Rose windows cannot consistently be planned on the lines suitable to lancets or other upright shapes; and it is interesting to observe the modificati...

Towards the fourteenth century, it seems, a wave of realism swept over Gothic art. So much is this so that a relatively speaking naturalistic form of ornamental detail is the mo...

But for the fond desire to be something more than an artist--to teach, to preach, to tell a story--the glazier would possibly have been quite content with the mere jewellery of...

It is not intended at present to say more than is absolutely necessary about "Style," in the historic sense--that is reserved for a chapter by itself--but, as it is convenient t...

In mediæval days the Church was the patron of art; and, when kings and corporations commissioned stained glass windows, it was usually to present them to Mother Church. It is in...

Since it is proposed to approach the subject of stained glass in the first place from the workmanlike and artistic, rather than the historical or antiquarian, point of view, it...

The end of the fifteenth century brings us to the point at which painting and glazing are most evenly matched, and, in so far, to the perfection of stained-and-painted glass, bu...

There is something very interesting in the simple heartedness with which the mediæval artist would attack a subject quite impossible of artistic realisation, apart from his mode...

The merry life of the medallion window was a short one. It reigned during the Early Gothic period supreme; but after the end of the thirteenth century it soon went quite out of...

The subjects depicted in stained glass tell the story of the Church, or preach its doctrine. Scenes from the Old Testament, from the Life of Christ, from the legends of the Sain...

The quality _par excellence_ of Renaissance glass was its painting; its dependence upon paint was its defect. Until about the middle of the sixteenth century the painter goes on...

The excessive use of opaque paint was not so much a new departure as the exaggeration of a tendency which had grown with the growth of glass painting itself. The really new thin...

It is easy, and it is only too common a thing, for the designer to depend for inspiration over much upon old work; but until he knows what has been done he is not fully equipped...

In quite the earliest glass the figures, it was shown, were cut out against a ground of plain colour (pages 33, 127), or diapered perhaps with a painted pattern, or leaded up in...

types, and the best examples, of the glass painter's new departure in the direction of light and shade. On the other hand, the large East window at S. Margaret's, Westminster (D...

With grisaille glass begins a new chapter in the history of glass painting, and a most important one--not only because of the beautiful work which was done from the first in whi...

The very simplest form of window glazing, the easiest and the thriftiest thing for the cutter to do, and the most straightforward for the glazier, is to frame together parallel-...

Inasmuch as it, in a sense, enshrines the figure, there exists some sort of symbolic reason for its use. But that is not enough to account for its all but universal employment....

Allusion has been made to the glass painter's use of the point for scraping out lights, and especially diapers upon glass coated with pigment. These are often quite lace-like in...

The just appreciation of stained glass is more than difficult, and judgment with regard to it more than ordinarily fallible. It is too much to expect of a window that it should...

There is a direction in which glass has never been fully developed, that of purely ornamental design. This is the more to be deplored because that direction is the one in which...

The point of view from which the subject of stained glass is approached in these chapters relieves me, happily, from the very difficult task of determining the date or the where...

of enamel by the specks of white among the colour, where the pigment has worked itself free, altogether to the destruction of pictorial illusion. And it is not only with transpa...

XI. THE DESIGN OF EARLY GLASS 111 XII. MEDALLION WINDOWS 123 XIII. EARLY GRISAILLE 137 XIV. WINDOWS OF MANY LIGHTS 151 XV. MIDDLE GOTHIC DETAIL 162 XVI. LATE GOTHIC WINDOWS 178...

CHAP. PAGE I. THE BEGINNINGS OF GLASS 1 II. THE MAKING OF A WINDOW 5 III. GLAZING 15 IV. EARLY MOSAIC WINDOWS 32 V. PAINTED MOSAIC 43 VI. GLASS PAINTING (MEDIÆVAL) 59 VII. GLASS...

XXVII. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF STYLE 322 XXVIII. STYLE IN MODERN GLASS (A POSTSCRIPT) 354 XXIX. JESSE WINDOWS, AND OTHER EXCEPTIONS IN DESIGN 360 XXX. STORY WINDOWS 371 XXXI. HOW...